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A Swiss man has been found guilty of poisoning a bird of prey with a so-called ‘kamikaze pigeon', the first time someone has been convicted of such a crime in Switzerland.

The district court in Dielsdorf, near Zurich, convicted the man for various offences including multiple counts of animal cruelty, reported news agency ATS on Monday.

The 42-year-old Swiss pigeon fancier confessed that in August 2015 he spread a banned, illegally-imported pesticide on one of his 200 pigeons and sent it out to fly.

As he intended, the pigeon was caught and eaten by a peregrine falcon – a protected species in Switzerland – which then died an agonizing death from the poison.

Reporting at the time of his arrest, the NZZ newspaper said the man was part of a group of pigeon fanciers in the area who participate in contests to see how long their birds can stay airborne.

The winner gets a cash prize, but those birds who fail to return – perhaps because they have fallen prey to a falcon – are disqualified from the competition.

The conviction is good news for bird protection organization Bird Life Switzerland, which has been trying to uncover the culprits in a spate of such falcon-killings in the Zurich area over the past few years.

After hearing about the issue, the organization erected webcams in various places in Zurich and filmed an incident where a falcon was killed by eating a poisoned pigeon.